Re: NASA releases parts of mars robots sotware package as open source.

On a sunny day (Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:39:47 -0500) it happened John Hasler
<john@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in <87ir9g2guk.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Jan Panteltje writes:
NASA releases mars robots sotware package as open source:
http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov/man/overview/index.php

Look at the license. It is neither Free Software nor Open Source.

Well, I am no lawyer, but 'open source' to me means basically: publish the source.

Apart from parrot like copy restrictions, you can then study the source,
and write your own.
Much better then closed source a la Microsof.

It is exactly this learning (or call it aping) possibility, that is the real value.
The rest is lawyers food, and of no value to me writing software.
But a lot of people make a big thing of it.

So I will not criticise this license of them, nor will I argue over GPL(1...n)
if all that stuff really ever starts annoying me, then I will simply publish under my own license,
exactly what Caltech is doing now.

Too often I hear about 'this great fore fighter of open source has just landed a ($$$) job with
Microsof', while I never ever did see a single line of code that 'great fore fighter' wrote,
never even heard about him.
Politics, careers, self promoting, lots of ***, fighting over a word in a license, not for me.
If you do not like that license then do not look at the soft.
In the mean time there are many many Linux programmers active in robotics who would like
to have a glimpse, even just at the API to see how they organised things.
Quote me on this.

El Pante
.

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